Curriculum Shouldn't Come in a Box

I teach at a preschool that practices emergent curriculum. This means, instead of planning out curriculum based on learning standards or arbitrary themes, teachers plan curriculum based off of the things that their students are actually interested in.

Before working at this school, every other preschool I worked at encouraged teachers to churn out weekly-based lesson plans around themes like, "space," "ocean," or "apples." Do some children truly love learning about space or the ocean? Sure. (I haven't met too many real life children who are so fascinated by apples that they would like or need to spend one week every September looking at apple seeds under a magnifying glass, stamping paper with sliced apples dipped in green or red paint, and reading multiple books about apples.) However, even if a few children love learning about the ocean, not every individual child in a classroom will. And for those that do share the same interests, they will hold this interest for varying amount of times.

So how does emergent curriculum work? What does it look like? For starters, teachers have to know their students well to know what they're into. Teachers who practice emergent curriculum spend time talking with, observing, and building connections with the students in their classroom. Sometimes emergent curriculum starts with a student asking a question like, "How many eyes do ants have?" Which can lead to teachers being researchers alongside their students to find out more. In this example, a teacher might pick up some books about ants and other insects from the library and place them in the classroom. If it seems like there is more interest, teachers could do multiple things like getting a class ant farm, going on a nature walk to find (and maybe draw) ants, printing pictures of ants to display near the art materials, getting different insects from a pet store for the children to hold, and on and on.

Or - a teacher could supply books about ants and discover that the question, "How many eyes do ants have?" is really more of a curiosity about eyes and anatomy. Or - a teacher could discover that the interest really stops there, and that's okay! Emergent curriculum doesn't have to follow the same time constraints of other types of curriculum. Some topics may only be of interest for an hour or a day or two. I once spent an entire summer setting up play provocations and supplying materials based off of my classroom's collective love of all things "spooky." We had spooky loose parts, a haunted house for dramatic play, books about spooky things, art provocations that included bats and bones... the list goes on.

Emergent curriculum can meet learning standards. One way to do this - is to kind of work backwards. To set up an engaging and thoughtful classroom environment that supports the interests of the students who occupy it, to observe what they do with the materials that have intentionally been supplied by teachers, and to read through learning standards to see how the standards are naturally being met through play. In California, an early learning standard that is expected of children by the time they are 60 months old (5 years), is that students can, "Understand that print is something that can be read and has specific meaning." (California Department of Education, 2008, p. 63). My spooky classroom students could demonstrate mastery of this standard by handing me a book about spiders and asking, "what does this word say?" or "can you read the name of this spider?"

To wrap it up: 1) emergent curriculum is based off of the interests and curiosities of the current students who make up a classroom, 2) emergent curriculum does not need to planned for a specific amount of time but should occur for as long or as little as the children are interested, and 3) emergent curriculum can meet learning standards when teachers know their students and the standards.

If you are a preschool teacher and see advertisements for "pre-planned curriculum in a box!" please consider how the companies who create these boxes could possibly know who the children are in your classroom and what is important to those children.

References

California Department of Education. (2008). California preschool learning foundations. https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/documents/preschoollf.pdf